Welcome to our continuing coverage of the eurozone crisis. All times are London time. Curated by Esther Bintliff and John Aglionby on the world news desk in London, with contributions from FT correspondents around the world. This post should update automatically every few minutes, but may take longer on mobile devices.

13.45: Following our Shakespeare competition earlier in the week, it’s time for another foray into the world of literary metaphor, courtesy of former Fed staffer Ed Yardeni, now of Yardeni Research. Ed has traditionally been one of the market’s biggest bulls. Now even he seems to have turned bearish…

An EU survey sheds more light on the decisive “no” vote in Ireland’s referendum on the union’s Lisbon reform treaty.

The study shows that those who voted against did so because of; a lack of knowledge of the treaty; a desire to protect Irish identity and safeguard neutrality; a lack of trust in politicians; the potential loss of a permanent commissioner in Brussels and to protect the tax system. Read more

A big and rather heavy parcel arrived in the Brussels office last week.

It contained three weighty tomes – including Norman Davies’ 1,365 page work ”Europe a History.” Also in the box were three discs, two large, glossy picture books and two brochures – all linked to the western Polish city of Wroclaw. Read more

The daily press briefing at the European Commission’s star-shaped Berlaymont HQ in Brussels is an event rarely noted for its humour.

Yesterday’s menu, for example, included questions to the Commission on the subjects of organised crime in Bulgaria, a court judgment on Sweden’s alcohol taxation rules, the Macedonian elections, and Greek asylum policy, among others. Read more

A colleague visited recently from the FT’s London mothership, and a few of us took him out to sample some hearty Belgian fare.

Over his beer and stoemp (bangers and mash, Belgian-style) he asked who in the Brussels machine was the ultimate dinner party guest. A member of the European parliament, a national ambassador to the EU, or a European commissioner?

The consensus was that with Brussels dancing to the beat of the European Commission (the EU executive), commissioners were at the top of the pecking order.

Granted, not all commissioners’ roles are equal. Holding the EU education and training portfolio (where the union has only a small role) hardly has the same cachet as, say, the competition supremo job which gives Neelie Kroes, the incumbent, the power to take on companies such as Microsoft.

But now this Commission has entered its final year and a half, and some of its members have already jumped ship. Markos Kyprianou, formerly health commissioner, has returned to Cyprus to become its foreign minister. Franco Frattini, justice commissioner, is on unpaid leave to participate in this month’s elections in his native Italy. Read more

Yes, I’m joking. Belgium faces a very difficult situation right now, and many people hope it will get out of its impasse in the coming weeks. But how?

A quick recap: The linguistically-divided country has been without a new government since an election more than five months ago.

The francophone parties and the Flemish groups expected to make up a centre-right coalition just can’t agree on state reform, prompting concerns that the country could break up along its linguistic fault lines. Read more

Since you’re reading this, it’s not too much to assume that you’re interested in the blogsphere…

So you might want to know about a report – The online world – a new constituency – which comes out tomorrow. It’ll be posted on the website of a PR firm called Edelman.

Perhaps it is a little self-serving for a blog to write up this study. After all, it details the growing role of the medium. And yes, it can be tricky for a report to get the measure of these sorts of phenomena. Still, for what it’s worth, here are some of the core points:

This leaves everyone to muse about the linguistically-divided country’s future, and in particular, the claim that the Flemings of the wealthy (Dutch-speaking) north and the Walloons of the poorer, francophone south, barely know each other.

One of the big upcoming stories in EU-land is the planned expansion of the union’s passport-free zone by the year-end.

It’s a tough task for the nine (almost all ex-Communist) countries to meet the criteria to join the Schengen area. (There are no internal frontier controls between member states that sign up to Schengen). In Wednesday’s paper, we wrote about the progress of the countries vying to join. The confidential report that we saw shows that a lot of work is still needed – especially on improving visa issuance. But some countries, notably Poland, have made great strides.

An intriguing twist in a tale that is fast turning into one of the best dramas in the Brussels law-making machine.

It’s all to do with whether some of the biggest telecoms companies in the EU – such as Deutsche Telekom – could be forced to change the way they work, as part of efforts to bolster broadband development.

On Wednesday, the EU’s national telecoms watchdogs unanimously backed a plan that would give them the right to break up large operators if other regulatory tools had failed.

Just setting up in sunny Amsterdam, where I’ll work for a couple of weeks. In Brussels last week, the talk was all about whether Belgium would split, creating an independent Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north, and a French-speaking nation in southern Wallonia. Why? Because three months after the general election, the political parties have failed to agree on a new, national government, and even an intervention by the King has failed – so far. So amid all the doom and gloom, it’s worth nothing that there’s visible support for the supposedly unloved Belgian state.

It’s by Ecta, a lobby group representing new telecoms companies that take on big, former state-run “incumbent” operators.

The study shows that EU broadband subscriptions have risen and are drawing level with the US and Japan. That said, the proportion of people signing up varies widely across member states and competition is weak in some countries.

One key point in the paper: in Britain, where regulators took radical action to split BT, the big telecoms group, the market is doing well and competition has increased.

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The authors

Alex Barker is the FT's Brussels bureau chief, covering foreign policy, some of the migration crisis and all things Brexit. He started in Brussels on the single market, financial regulation and competition beat. He was formerly an political correspondent in Westminster and joined the FT in 2005.

Duncan Robinson is the FT's Brussels correspondent, covering internet and telecommunications regulation, justice, employment and migration as well as Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. He joined the FT from the New Statesman in 2011.

Jim Brunsden joined the Financial Times as an EU Correspondent in August 2015. He began his career in Brussels in 2006, as a reporter first for Europolitics, and then European Voice. Prior to joining the FT he covered financial regulation for Bloomberg from 2010 to 2015.